Katherine Manners was the richest girl in England, a Catholic, and wife to royal favourite George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham. George rose until his bloody assassination, and religious tension loomed over Kate's 2nd marriage to an Irish noble. She was a woman behind great men, and this is her definitive biography.

Frankie McCracken is still recovering from the Psychedelic Sixties when, while working as a fire lookout in the Canadian Rockies, he finds himself wrestling with a miracle-worker who claims to be the late Jack Kerouac, King of the Beats. This kaleidoscopic coming-of-age novel arrives in 2016 like a note in a bottle from a distant world.

At 24, Neil Godwin, newly hatched from Oxford, is back home in Newfoundland and ready to govern. But Premier Percy Clapp, cunning, pernicious and charming who brought him into the political fold to destroy him puts him through his paces in corruption, cruelty and betrayal. But the dirtiest trick of all is stripping Neil of his idealism. Raw and bawdy, this cunning satire is a classic primer.

Dream Dresses is a short story collection about women's dreams and the dresses they choose to express them. Covering the life span of women from childhood to old age, these stories explore how the fabric of women's dreams and aspirations become so entangled with attire that the dress and the dream become one and the same.

In the 1830's, British North America throbbed with rebellion. Factions in the Canadas wanted democratic reforms from British overlords. Bands of American gun runners south of the border wanted to annex the territory. In Upper and Lower Canada, English and French settles were at odds. Enter dashing Marc Edwards, soldier, detective, and lawyer working to restore justice in the wild zone.

When celebrated novelist Connie Brewster, her handsome husband and her two grown, charming children are caught in a hail of bullets just after she wins the Booker Prize, the impact causes ripples beyond physical injuries. This is a witty, sly tale of fractures in a marriage, the death of illusion, and reversal of values told by a master.

The political elite attends a charity ball at the residence of Humphrey Cardiff. His widowed daughter, Delores, flirts with all the men, enraging their wives. Amidst the political plotting of Marc Edwards and his associates, Delores is found dead, with one of her suitors standing over the body. Marc controversially decides to defend him, while Cobb races to find the truth behind her untimely death

Someone is killing women in 1841 Toronto. One victim is a singer in a bordello frequented by three prominent men. Another is a man dressed as a woman. The only evidence are a glove and a set of footprints in the snow. Cobb is on the case. Meanwhile, his former comrade Marc Edwards is in Kingston trying to forge an alliance between Upper and Lower Canada for the opening of Parliament.

In Toronto 1839, an abortion goes tragically wrong, killing a 15-year-old maid in the household of the distinguished Baldwin family, enveloping them in a scandal that has political implications for the union of two British colonies, Ontario and Quebec. Accused of raping a minor and causing her death is a beloved Baldwin uncle. Marc Edwards has the challenge of his career in finding the truth.

A locked mansion mystery set near Toronto in 1839 where the fate of Canada depends on finding the killer. Marc and Robert Baldwin, working for responsible government, are secretly meeting with with Quebec leaders. But a murder interferes and all are suspects. Marc and Cobb have three days to solve it before political enemies of democracy learn their plans and sink their progress.

In Toronto’s rough days of 1839, several elite citizens harbor dark secrets, offering rich compost for a sleazy blackmailer. Caught in the muck is the gallant young Brodie Langford who is desperate to protect his sweetheart from disgrace. When Brodie is arrested for the extortionist’s murder, Marc Edwards, now a barrister, struggles to save him from the gallows and to reunite the couple.

Lurid gossip trails Dick Dougherty in his flight from New York to Toronto in 1838. But calumny mixes with politics, and a fiery sermon by Bishop John Strachan incites his murder. Dick is found dead with a note on his back bearing one word “Sodomite.” Marc Edwards, Dick’s dear friend, travels to New York to investigate. Even he is shocked by the depravity he uncovers.

Tony Aspler says he is a wine evangelist, not a critic. Here he celebrates the pleasures of the grape and shares nuggets of wisdom. He offers tips for bluffing the best wine snobs, describes flying wine-serving Angels in Las Vegas, and can even use wine to fish. He recounts wine peccadillos of the powerful and shares details on the history and production of wine. Enjoy, glass in hand!

When lovable P.I. Jimmy Temple investigates the murder of a wealthy L.A. businessman and owner of a decaying Hollywood funeral home, he uncovers the sweetest scam this side of Hell. But his sleuthing in the embalming room puts Jimmy in touch with his new found psychic abilities and the terrifying specter of his own death. He has two days to avert it. Smart, funny, eerie and brutal.

A client asks Lara McClintoch to buy an antique Chinese silver box containing a formula for immortality. After the box is stolen from a Beijing auction house, Lara follows a dangerous trail through the back alleys of modern China to find it. Despite its promise of life forever, the box keeps getting people killed. Lara fears she will be next unless she can uncover the secret behind the heist.

Written with a novelist’s panache, this is the true story of the Chinese spy who penetrated the CIA, and for 30 years revealed America’s intelligence secrets to his masters in Beijing. Larry Chin, the CIA’s top Chinese linguist, was China’s top spy.
“A successful cloak-and-dagger reenactment of the FBI sting that exposed a Chinese-American double agent in 1985, “ said Kirkus.

Lara McClintoch’s professional pride is hurt when an antique cabinet she thought was genuine is deemed a fake. When the antique dealer who sold it for a million dollars is murdered and the money goes missing, Lara follows the forgery trail to Scotland’s Orkney Islands, once ruled by the Vikings. The place is pretty and the people kind, but Lara feels danger closing in on her.

Fascism was not a mass movement in Canada in the 1930s, but it threatened the country’s health. In his review, Mordecai Richler wrote, “Dr. Betcherman has written a lively, readable history, the stronger for being detached and allowing the embarrassing facts to speak for themselves….It is strong , evocative stuff, a necessary reminder of how things were. I recommend it highly.”

How many people put a visit to remote and mysterious Easter Island on their life to-do list? Lara McClintoch and her best friend Moira share a yearning to hug one of those famous giant carved heads. But when they get to the island, someone is bumping off members of a strange congress gathered to study local culture. Who has murder on their bucket list? Lara races against time to stop the killing.

Roommates from college draw Lara McClintoch into an encounter with an old lover and the mystery surrounding a 25,000 year-old statue. To find if the antiquity is real or fake, Lara traces the path of a 19thC adventurer who is said to have found the statue in Hungary. Lara learns that digging up the past can be dangerous, whether it is someone else’s or your own.

When Will Beauchamp closed his antique shop in Bangkok and disappeared, he left behind a family in Toronto and a lot of questions. When fellow antiques dealer Lara McClintoch tries to find him in Thailand, she faces suspicion and deceit. Did Will run away? Was he involved in corruption? Why was he fascinated by an old murder case? Now people he knew are under attack, but Lara keeps searching.

In his years of research on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, David Pratt, a respected scholar, noticed a gap in the literature: the absence of a work that simply presents the evidence and allows readers to judge. This book fills that gap by offering a timeline of firmly established evidence. No theories or conspiracies. But the evidence does not support the Warren Commission verdict.

In Rome, a reclusive billionaire businessman asks antiques dealer Lara McClintoch to find a rare Etruscan artifact for his collection. Lara likes the idea of visiting the beautiful hill towns of Tuscany on an expense account. But when strange men start following her, an eccentric collector dies suddenly, and a strange package turns up in her car, Lara feels evil closing in on her.

Antiques dealer Lara McClintoch is leading a group of tourists through the souks, mosques and ruins of Tunisia. When one member of the tour is found dead in the pool and another dies in a hotel fire, the police think accident; Lara thinks murder. Then there’s trouble in the harbor as two ships compete for marine treasure. Lara’s quest for justice climaxes in a harrowing race across the desert.

The reading of a wealthy man’s will in Ireland sets off a murder spree and a treasure hunt, and antiques dealer Lara McClintoch is in the middle of the action. Lara’s friend Alex is one of the beneficiaries of the Will, and she is worried he may be on the murderer’s list. Following clues to a promised treasure in the Irish countryside may be the way to fortune – or death.

Before Simon Bolivar, there was Francisco de Miranda who plotted to free Spain’s colonies in South America. Roaming the world, he cajoled funds from the powerful, including Britain’s William Pitt and Russia’s Catherine the Great. But Miranda’s invasion of New Spain in 1806 was a painful fiasco. He died a prisoner in a Spanish dungeon and the way was now clear for Bolivar’s eventual triumph.

After winning a bidding war for a box of junk, just to spite her ex-husband, Lara McClintoch gets more than she bargained for. Suddenly, Lara’s antiques shop in Toronto is a target for burglary, arson and murder, causing her to realize the junk isn’t as worthless as she thought. Looking for answers, Lara follows the clues to Peru where things get worse before they get better.

Antiques dealer Lara McClintoch expects a working holiday on the Mediterranean island of Malta will be a nice break from the Canadian winter–until she discovers a dead body stuffed inside an antique chest and another impaled on an ancient knight’s sword. Lara races to solve the murders in time to foil an assassination plot in this exciting thriller.

When the British ruled India, four Victorian women find themselves in a disturbing land, experiencing extremes of decadence amid crushing poverty. Emily Eden, Charlotte Canning, Edith Lytton and Mary Curzon followed husbands or a brother who were appointed Viceroys. In this compelling slice of colonial history we see how India marked them with its heat, mutinies and lascivious secrets.

Penelope, age 70, searches for the meaning of life in the accreted layers of love, lust, guilt, family, pot luck suppers, and time and chaos theory. Her efforts may be destined to fail, but the journey is joyous. “This book is a great read: a compact narrative and a wide-ranging story… it ended far too soon,” wrote the Globe and Mail.

Library Journal describes the romantic mystery No Defense as a “powerful first novel.” At her father’s behest, and over her husband’s objections, LuAnn moves her husband and children home to Alabama. There she inadvertently spurs the investigation that leads to her father’s indictment. Family secrets, a taut story line, and a surprising ending combine to create a riveting courtroom drama.

Lily’s Story tells the tale of a remarkable pioneer woman, born in the backwoods of Ontario in 1840. Lily’s struggle to survive and grow and discover her place in the scheme of things is complicated by the travail of frontier living, and the impact of historical events themselves. Lily’s Story is part history and part fable, with historical personages and a bizarre gallery of local characters.

Lara McClintoch, antiquities expert, is summoned to Mexico to help a colleague decode an ancient Mayan mystery. But the theft of Mayan treasure and Lara’s discovery of a corpse on the museum roof make her a suspect of robbery and murder. Desperate to prove her innocence, Lara must unmask the killer and stop a tomb robber in the shadowy world of Xibalba, the Lords of Death.

Rock’n’roll mirrors society’s changing attitudes about sex. The women who fainted at Little Richard and Elvis Presley concerts, Sid and Nancy’s troubled punk-rock relationship, and the Riot Grrrl movement transformed sexual mores. Renowned historian Edward Shorter explores the connection between sex and the music that defined 20th Century culture in this funny and incisive short account.

Winston Groom describes Things Are Going to Slide as “a gripping tale” that “beautifully renders the texture of Southern life.” In this compelling page-turner, heroine Marilee’s life quickly begins to spin out of control when her husband leaves her, her first love steals a promotion from under her nose, and her legal clinic must defend a teenager accused of killing her newborn. A must read.

Benny Cooperman, the most endearing private eye in literature, is sprung from small-town Grantham and working in Toronto. A dealer in rare books asks him to investigate the theft of an ancient Jewish manuscript. While Benny is immersed in the strange world of antique book collectors, his client turns up dead and the robbery isn't all it seems. A short mystery starring Canada’s great detective.

An engaging account of a formative period in Canada's political history, just as important as Senator McCarthy's Red Scare was in the US. This is an unbiased account of midnight arrests, imprisonment without trial, and forced deportation faced by those whose only crimes were unpopular political opinions. This story is an important lesson in human rights, regardless of ideology.

David Pratt scoured books, articles and speeches by 826 Nobel prize winners for distilled wisdom from the world’s acknowledged geniuses. Here, he has winnowed 916 quotations from his collection of 7500, for business executives to use in their own presentations.They range from scientists to literary giants: Einstein, Curie, Hemingway, Kissinger, Martin Luther King and more.

This short book by award-winning historian Edward Shorter explores the popular appeal of erotica and the allure of sadomasochism. Shorter, author of 'Written in the Flesh: A History of Desire chronicles the history of SM, a practice which is a recent addition to the tool kit of sexual pleasure and refutes the notion that it is about pain.

Edwards Air Force Base: the giant Hypersonic Jet Yorktown with the Shuttle Columbia clasped to her back, climbs to the sky. Their pioneering mission: to launch the Shuttle into space from the edge of the atmosphere. Neither craft will reach its destination. One will never return. This dramatic bestselling novel of a space mission gone perilously wrong, first published in 1981, thrills again.

Winner of the Leacock Medal for Humor, this memoir captures life in a small northern town of Torgov’s youth in the heady era of the 20th C from the Depression to WWII. Here Jewish merchants, English lawyers, Scots bankers, Ukrainian domestics and a few Chinese struggle to make a living in a remote outpost. And it is here that a young man, yearning for a larger life, turns his comic gaze.

A classic is back! Max Glick, a small-town teenager with doting grandparents and helicopter parents, dreams of a career as a concert pianist. But his elders favor sensible professions like medicine, law or science. Help comes from his music teacher and a rabbi with ambitions to be a stand-up comic. Winner of the Leacock Medal for Humor, a Torgi Award, adapted for TV and an award winning film.

Ben Marshall, 13, faces a summer of unpalatable choices: He can shuffle between his newly divorced parents, too distracted to notice him; or he can visit his grandfather Ira, a cranky, small-town lawyer, who is a stickler for rules. When Ira's wealthy client, Mrs. O'Hearn dies, instructing him in her will to "put down" her beloved dog, Ira rebels. With Ben as his accomplice, they go on the run.

In a tale reminiscent of The Front Page, Harry Barnes, a young reporter joins the Daily Witness where the managing editor, Philip Butcher fires journalists while clamping down on real news. To amuse himself Harry writes hilarious Butcher stories, which inexplicably appear in the Witness. When he falls for Julia, a reporter who is hot for rebellion, Harry is tempted to rock the boat all the way.

In this Cold War satire, Dimitri, a young Kremlin spy is secretly smitten by the sirens of capitalism. When he is assigned to the Soviet Consulate in New York City, he is thrilled. But his talent for making money on Wall Street creates problems with the Kremlin. Originally published by Houghton Mifflin, it is lauded as “a wonder of intense, cinematic storytelling” by the Wall Street Journal.

It was North America’s biggest drug bust, worth $238 million. The man behind it was a small-town businessman who fooled the Miami drug barons who were setting up a pipeline into Canada. Leonard Mitchell worked undercover for the RCMP for 19 months because “it was the right thing to do.” He was successful but it earned him a lifetime run from the mob and he also had to take on the Mounties.

First published by Bantam Books and hailed by critics, this is the rollicking love story of Leo and Tina Klein in 1950s New York. He is a charming rogue with ties to the mob. She is a leftist activist and manager of “Ivory Joe” Coulter, a heart-busting black musician. Burke weaves a deft plot involving the attempted theft of one of Joe's songs, to give us a joyous tale of energy and soul.

Gen Varley, a PhD in computer science has ambitions for career and love. Virginal in the ways of office politics and the human heart, Gen is shocked by her boss's deceit, her boring boyfriend's secret life, and her affair with a married co-worker that reduces her to subtle stalker. Allies include a mentor who turns fairy godmother with surprising consequences. A delightful romp by a major writer.